Tag: what we’re playing

About a month ago I got gifted a copy of Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army 2 on Steam and I didn’t bother playing it until this past weekend. I didn’t expect much from it, but I was surprised at how fun it ended up being.

If you’ve played Call of Duty’s zombie mode, then the set-up will sound very familiar: four WW2-era soldiers battle the Nazi zombie horde while searching for a way to end the onslaught. The difference here is that Sniper Elite is very much focused on long-range combat, so you’ll mostly be pulling sick headshots on a lot of shambling zombies. Unlike CoD’s version, the zombies (for the most part) in NZA2 are the slow, shuffling variety so you always have a fighting chance. There are a few “super” zombies like the machine gun guy or the summoner, but as you progress the zombies don’t get faster and more resilient, which I greatly appreciated.

Nazi Zombie Army 2 is by no means perfect, as I found that actually controlling your character was fairly sloppy and the cover system was basically useless. What NZA2 does well, however, is giving you slow-motion shots of your bullets destroying undead Nazi skulls and in the end, isn’t that all we really want?

A friend and I played this for a couple of hours on Saturday and I had a blast. The fact that it was free definitely helped, but it was much better than I expected and it got me interested in the Sniper Elite franchise in general (which has a three-quel coming out, wouldn’t you know it). Has anyone played any of the Sniper Elite series? What do you think of it?

I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for the “hurry up and wait games” on iOS. Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes (both by NimbleBit) sucked me in for a couple dozen hours each time. I’m not so impatient that I feel the overwhelming need to buy premium currency in these types of games, and they usually have something to do while you wait (such as Tiny Tower’s elevator).

Just recently my girlfriend turned me on to Pixel People, a game released earlier this year by Lambda Mu and Chillingo, the latter of which you may recognize as the publisher of Angry Birds. Pixel People sees you as the mayor of a floating space city that expands by splicing clones of a different profession together to create a new one (for example the first splice you do is of the mayor and the mechanic clone, which gives you the engineer profession). Every time you splice together a new profession, you get the opportunity to make a new building. Different clones can be combined together, and overall there are about 306 jobs to discover. You assign the clones a job and sometimes the buildings will have a special effect for your city. Continue reading Pixel People Is a Scarily Addictive Mash of SimCity and Tiny Tower

After Skyrim, I thought to myself, what’s the most stressful, rage-inducing experience I could put myself through? Naturally, a trip to the DMV was my first choice but there were no appointments available. So I went with the next best thing: Dark Souls. The only difference being, with Dark Souls, there is a chance, albeit slim, that I could end up feeling good about myself.

I didn’t quite finish it back when it came out, so I deleted my save and started anew. Thankfully, my skills had not atrophied over time and I quickly cut my way through the first few areas. Even the bosses that once gave me fits found themselves bowing to my mighty sword. The rush you get when clearing an area is like few in gaming. No Achievement or Trophy has ever made me feel the sense of accomplishment that I got when I finally dropped the Capra Demon in the Lower Undead Burg. My next stop is the infamous Blighttown, an area that I have heard horror stories about.

Have you ever stopped a game for a really long period of time and when you came back, you find that you are somehow really good at it now? This happened to me with Pac-Man, as well. I sucked as a kid, but as an adult, I can usually get the high score. Just like I did during GamerSushi Weekend. Seriously, ask the guys, they will tell you. I even called it beforehand, too.

So what about you? What games have you stopped and then picked up again later without missing a beat? Have you stopped a game and then discovered when you come back to it that you have no idea how to play anymore? Do you plunge through or restart?

I’ve recently started digging deep into Fire Emblem: Awakening and I’m having a great time so far. It’s taken me a bit to get used to its own special brand of SRPG, but I am starting to understand the mechanics and I’m improving with every battle, which is all you can really ask for. You can’t expect to master a game like this from the outset, otherwise, where is the strategy there?

But with this learning curve comes a danger: perma-death. That’s right, the terrible tragedy of losing one of your favorite characters lurks at every turn. To make matters even more frustrating, the enemy has no such fears. They will rush forward in a suicidal frenzy, knowing with certainty that you will kill them on your next turn, but they pay no heed to their own safety. For them, it’s worth it if they can take down one of your squad. It’s not fair and makes the game even more challenging than it would be normally, but that’s what makes it nerve-wracking. Continue reading Resetting the Past in Fire Emblem

We talk a lot about backlogs here at GamerSushi, as some of us (mainly me) have an annoying tendency to buy games and then let them sit on the shelf for weeks and months at a time as we get distracted by something fresh and shiny. It’s funny because gamers complained for years about the Fall Onslaught of games, but now instead of a sudden rush, we have a year-long trickle that makes finishing a game before the next one you want comes out tough, not to mention making a dent on the backlog.

This is something I’ve been confronted with since I received Ni No Kuni on my birthday back in February. My goal was to put a dent in it until Simcity came out and then play Simcity until Bioshock Infinite was released. From there, I had no real idea what I was going to do after I beat Bioshock Infinite; likely go back to Ni No Kuni and split time with that and Simcity until Ni No Kuni was completed and I was sick of Simcity. Continue reading Clearing The Plate for Bioshock Infinite